1. Field of the Invention
This invention finds use in the field of electric street lighting. In particular, this invention relates to the application of RFID or similar wireless technology to operate, monitor operating characteristics and/or capture historical parametric data for one or more electric streetlights.
2. Background
Electric street lights are of a general high priority due to road safety and security issues along public streets, certain areas of high security, or any area where homeland safety and security issues arise. Previously, streetlight controllers have historically only turned the street lights on or off with a given preset light level or off after a delayed time usually 4 hours after dark.
A further problem in the current technology street light controllers is that a pulsating light source, i.e., a laser pointer, can fool the street light control and turn the street light off. This is of particular interest to those areas of high security in which the lighting conditions are of paramount importance.
Existing street light controllers also have no self-diagnostic capability in that they can not monitor lamp current to determine if a light is cycling off and on (a particular failure mode of the lamp), if the bulb is on during the daylight hours (a different typical control failure mode), or if the bulb has failed and will not turn on during the normal dark times.
Further, existing street light controls cannot be used for any type of remote sensing of the conditions of radiological, biological, chemical or environmental conditions useful in an alerting system for homeland security.
Finally, current technology street light controllers cannot wirelessly communicate with ground personnel proximate to the street light, or communicate in a peer-to peer fashion to a central data collection point.